Mini-bottles make drinking a novelty in S.C. / State is last in the U.S. to require bars to serve liquor from minuscule containers

Manuel Roig-Franzia, Washington Post

Published 4:00 am, Sunday, March 28, 2004

The humble mini-bottle -- relegated to airplane service carts and hotel honor bars in much of the rest of the world -- reigns like a tiny king over the bars of South Carolina. Pub owners build special chrome and wood cabinets to hold the shrunken bottles that mimic their larger cousins right down to the hand-dipped wax on the Maker's Mark bourbon and the raised filigreed artwork on the Belvedere vodka.

Customers -- that is, those who aren't doubled over laughing when the bartender pulls down a wee bottle -- are known to ooh and ahh over them: "Isn't that sweet? ... Oh, look, that one has a little crown on top!"

The big bottles have tried to muscle in for years.

But the mini-bottle has big friends, powerful friends, who have ensured that South Carolina retains the distinction of being the only state in the nation requiring bars to serve all hard liquor in mini-bottles. The mini- bottle's place behind the bar is even enshrined in the state's constitution.

But the most carefully constructed kingdom can fall, and these are dark, dark days for the mini-bottle in South Carolina. Lawmakers in the state capital of Columbia -- two hours away from laissez-faire Charleston by car, but a million miles away in attitude -- are closer than ever to changing the state's 32-year-old mini-bottle law and forcing a statewide vote in November on a constitutional amendment that would open bars to more traditionally sized liquor bottles.

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State Sen. Robert W. Hayes Jr., a Republican from Rock Hill who keeps a thick Bible on his desk and is leading the legislative fight against mini- bottles, attributes all sorts of ills to the "silly law." Hayes, 52, says he's never taken a sip of alcohol, and he labels mini-bottles as impractical landfill cloggers. More important, he says, is that they contribute mightily to South Carolina's high rate of drunken driving deaths.

You see, as it turns out -- and on this the mini-bottle lovers and haters agree -- the mini-bottle is not so small, after all. A mini-bottle holds 1.7 ounces of liquor, and bartenders must pour all 1.7 ounces -- no more, no less. It may not look like much, but compared with the average drink size around the country -- which is 1 to 1.25 ounces of liquor -- it packs a wallop.

And South Carolina dispenses a lot of wallop. Each year, the state's bars sell about 70 million mini-bottles, and the number is only expected to rise as more tourists visit Charleston's graceful, antebellum streets and go wild on the strip in Myrtle Beach.

But if Hayes is going to succeed in taking mini-bottles from their place of prominence, he'll have to get past Clyde Burris. And this is no easy task.

Burris, who owns Burris Liquors on the edge of Charleston's historic district, walks through his store with a .38-caliber Smith & Wesson tucked into his back pocket. In the late 1970s, Burris -- a Golden Gloves boxer in his youth -- shot a robber in the back after chasing him down the street.

The newspaper columnists called him a "pistol-packing, punch-throwing" liquor store owner. He keeps the yellowing pages in a scrapbook and grins when he shows them off.

"They know that ol', gray-haired man is crazy," Burris, 63, says.

18 million each year

Burris likes mini-bottles -- a lot. Each year, he sells 18 million of them from the unassuming store he opened after coming back to his hometown from his football playing days at Mississippi State University. Burris, who combs his white hair straight back, as he has for years, takes in about $1 million from mini-bottle sales in a good month -- and just about every month is a good one.

Burris' money is sure to play a role in fighting any constitutional amendment. His friends are, too.

His walls are lined with pictures of South Carolina politicians, and he's a player in the state's Republican politics. Decades ago, when a young man named George W. Bush wanted to go duck hunting in South Carolina, he went with Clyde Burris.

Burris makes an economic argument in defense of mini-bottles. The state collects 25 cents on each mini-bottle the minute it leaves one of South Carolina's four wholesalers and is sent to the 58 or so liquor stores, such as Burris', that have licenses to sell directly to bars and restaurants. Without the mini-bottles, he says, the tax would be collected on bar sales, and it would be easier for bar owners to cheat the taxman and fool their customers with short drinks poured from tall bottles.

He also says Hayes and others in Columbia are dead wrong when they predict South Carolina will not lose a big chunk of the $20 million it collects annually from mini-bottle sales, an argument that could resonate in this poor state.

"They're the biggest fools to even think about it," Burris says. "The state is gonna lose money like nobody's business."

Confusing as South Carolina's mini-bottle quagmire might seem, it's nothing compared with the lunacy that preceded it. In the late 1800s and during Prohibition, Charleston was renowned for its "blind tiger bars." Customers would pay an admission fee to see blind tigers in the back rooms of restaurants. When they discovered there was no blind tiger -- and there were never any blind tigers -- the restaurant owner would make up for the wink- and-nod rip-off by offering a few "free" drinks that miraculously cost exactly the same as the admission fee.

After Prohibition, South Carolina went to brown-bagging. Customers would bring their own liquor in a brown sack, and restaurants would provide the mixers. Fancy joints even set up permanent lockers for their regulars' stash.

When John West ran for governor in the early 1970s, he walked into one Hilton Head Island bar that brazenly displayed quarts of liquor and another that hid them in cubicles, recalls his friend, state Sen. Dick Elliott, a Democrat from Myrtle Beach. West asked the owner of the cubicles why he bothered, and the man said, "We think that it is less illegal."

Once in office, Gov. West became the father of the mini-bottle, offering up the law to "bring order to chaos," Elliott says. Other states had similar laws, but West wanted to take it a step further and placed South Carolina's mini-bottle law in the constitution to make it tougher for his opponents to change the statute after he left office.

He succeeded; South Carolina became the center of the mini-bottle universe in 1990 when Utah -- the only other state clinging to mini-bottles -- became the eighth state to abandon them.

The very people who helped West pass the mini-bottle law as a way to limit consumption -- the teetotalers and religious conservatives -- are now helping Hayes' bid to abolish the law. Chain bars and restaurants, eager for standardization, are backing the change, too. The compromise they've all suggested is to remove the mini-bottle requirement and give bar owners a choice of whether to use mini-bottles or larger bottles.

Rite of the mini-bottle

South Carolina's tussle over changing the mini-bottle law has become an annual rite of spring.

This year, one state senator -- a beer wholesaler named Phil Leventis, a Democrat from Sumter -- filibustered for days before being outmaneuvered by mini-bottle opponents. Another senator offered the passionate defense that his mother is a mini-bottle collector and would be deprived of the pleasure of driving from bar to bar, picking up new additions.

"It's not as crazy as some people want to make it, like we're ol' hayseeds here in South Carolina," Leventis says.

On busy nights, some bars look a little like a football locker room. Bartenders wrap up with athletic tape to prepare for all that twisting of metal caps.

Because Keller is forbidden to pour a partial mini-bottle, a Long Island Iced Tea -- made of vodka, rum, tequila, gin and triple sec -- gets so big it has to be served in a pitcher and contains 8.5 ounces of liquor. The lightweights ask for "two split three ways or one split two ways," Keller says.

But her eyes widen as the conversation turns to South Carolina's quirky law.

"What?" she asks. "That's ridiculous."

Behind the bar, Angelo Marcey scoops handfuls of little vodka bottles. The bottles tumble out of his hands, slipping onto the cooler and clattering on the floor. Finally, he gives up. Tables are waiting to be served. He grabs another handful and heads for the dining area, his pockets stuffed with little bottles of booze.

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